20 Facts About Pulickel Ajayan

Pulickel Madhavapanicker Ajayan is the Benjamin M and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering at Rice University, Houston, Texas.

Pulickel Ajayan is a Professor in the Materials Science and NanoEngineering Department and holds joint appointments with the Department of Chemistry and Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Pulickel Ajayan has contributed significantly to the field of nanotechnology over the past three decades of his academic career and is particularly known for his pioneering work in the early days of the discovery and development of carbon nanotubes.

Pulickel Ajayan was born on 15 July 1962 to K Madhavapanicker, a telephone technician, and Pulickel Radha, a Hindi school teacher at the local high school.

Pulickel Ajayan studied in a government school in Kodungallur where the medium of instruction was Malayalam until 6th standard, after which he moved to Loyola School, Thiruvananthapuram, a high school he has credited for making a strong impact on him.

In 1985, Pulickel Ajayan graduated at the top of his class with a BTech degree in Metallurgical Engineering from IIT Varanasi.

Pulickel Ajayan has been a pioneer in the field of nanotechnology.

Pulickel Ajayan's works reporting the first observation of the smallest nanotubes with a single layer, large-scale method for synthesizing nanotubes, and filling of nanotube hollows with capillary forces were all early breakthroughs that led to the development of the nanotube field.

Pulickel Ajayan has published more than 1300 journal papers, which have earned more than 230,000 citations on Google Scholar and an h-index of 233 as of March 2025.

Pulickel Ajayan has to his credit two Guinness World Records for creating the smallest brush and the darkest material.

Pulickel Ajayan's work has involved designing new materials for contaminant removal from water, nanotube sponges for selective absorption of oil from oil-water mixture, and catalysts for CO2 reduction.

Pulickel Ajayan's group has published several pioneering works in the vapour phase growth methods for the synthesis of atomically thin 2D materials such as boron nitride, transition metal dichalcogenides and their hybrid constructs.

Pulickel Ajayan's group has contributed to 3D printing of complex architected structures from different materials systems.

Pulickel Ajayan's group is working on the synthesis of artificial diamonds and other ultra-wide bandgap materials such as boron nitride.

Pulickel Ajayan is the founding chair of the Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering at Rice and served as its chair for the first ten years.

Pulickel Ajayan serves on the advisory board of several materials and nanotechnology journals, nanotechnology startups and international conferences.

Constantly travelling to disseminate knowledge, Pulickel Ajayan has a large number of collaborators worldwide and several of his past group members presently hold faculty positions abroad and inside the United States.

Pulickel Ajayan has had distinguished visiting professor positions at various prestigious Universities around the world, such as several of the IITs, and IISC in India, NTU Singapore, Shinshu University, Japan and ISIS Strasbourg, France.

Pulickel Ajayan has been consistently listed among the most cited researchers and top materials scientists in the world.

Pulickel Ajayan is married to Poornima, who works at Rice University as a program manager, and they have two daughters, Anakha and Ahi.